Rift between Prince Harry’s wife and her father may not have significant impact on perception of Royals

“I have been watching with a certain amount of interest and it does seem like a bad episode … of Coronation Street, a soap opera,” said British public relations expert Mark Borkowski, who has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Where’s the family allegiance?

PR expert Borkowski would have “got well ahead of this and dealt with it right at … the outset” during the wedding preparations and brought Markle into the royal camp.

“Clearly they’re in a very difficult situation,” Borkowski said. “They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. He’s proving to be a man who is being paid regularly by some of these … [media] agencies in America. They’re feeding him and he is performing like some sort of dancing pony by keeping this narrative going.”

“I think it’s crept up on them,” said Borkowski. “Everybody makes mistakes and I think it was a mistake that was made, and it’s a very difficult one to recover from. Maybe they tried.”

From Borkowski’s perspective, the palace needs to keep Meghan’s father at “arm’s length because anything they’re likely to try and do he’s going to use for his own income.”

Borkowski expects there have been numerous attempts through intermediaries to sort this out, “but really it’s between a daughter and her father.”

And in that, maybe it’s not so far removed from what families outside the palace walls face — and this could engender some empathy for Meghan.

“I think most families across the world will have a narrative about an estranged relative,” said Borkowski. “I think there’s a more realistic feeling now towards the Royal Family, so you know these things happen to them, they’re out in the open.”

For all the tabloid attention the Markle debacle has foisted on the Royal Family, there isn’t a sense it is having a significant negative impact on the public perception of Meghan and Harry and the House of Windsor right now.

“It seems like a bad narrative going on, but I think people want to see Harry and Meghan succeed in terms of a relationship,” Borkowski said.